“Five pounds please”.
“Sorry?”
“You've gotta pay a fiver to get in”
“But I'm reviewing the night”
“You've still gotta pay to come in, you see this guy next to me? Yeah? Well he's pretty big isn't he? And he would absolutely love to kick your malformed ass across the street if you keep asking me questions.”
“Ok! Ok, but I thought this night was call Not for Profit.”
“No you misread, its called Not For Prophet, we're quite happy to pocket some coin. Just don't expect to stumble across any pearls of wisdom once inside, we're strictly not here for enlightenment.”
With this cleared up, your humble reviewer made it's way inside Saki Bar, where some kind of snuff film was just ending. It pays not be squeamish in this job, but somehow I got the feeling this was going to be a strange one. By the entrance, a make shift merch desk consisted solely of crack pipes and 9/11 conspiracy theory books. Prying one such manuscript from the post rigour clutches of a severely burnt-out Ket fiend, I began to leaf through the pages. According to this poorly produced and badly edited document, in 1969 when the WTC was nearly complete, Donald Rumsfeld (then Director of the United States Office of Economic Opportunity), arranged for each tower to conceal an incredibly powerful electro magnet. When activated, the monoliths would create magnetic fields strong enough to pull an airliner out of the sky. It was a long shot, but as the man in charge of Economic Opportunity, Don had the vision to see it to completion and 35 years later he was leading US troops across Iraqi oilfields. A dastardly plan, so far fetched it could only be true.
As I became more and more immersed in this putrid pile of polarized propaganda, I could hear several poets harping on about something or other. In the face of this revelation, and I've got to be honest here, I just didn't care. Same goes for the DJs (some kind of low end rumbles) and the bands (acoustic hipsters, I imagine, but can't for the life of me recall); entertainment had suddenly become trivial, a bourgeois exercise in self-denial. As I finished book after book, cover to cover, sheets of cold sweat dripping from my brow, I became ever more oblivious to my surroundings. I was coming to terms with an awful truth (and let's not even get into Michael Moore's involvement in this cyber-Fawkesian plot), a slow dawning that the hand that had fed me all of my life had also been the very same that kept pushing me under.
Later, as the aforementioned bouncer dragged me away from the table (book still in hand- apologies to the organisers), I found myself shivering in awe, trying to take in the significance of what I had just experienced. It is only now that I find the words to describe such a profound gathering, a commune forced to operate under the guise of a club night, in order to spread The Truth. Not For Prophet changed my life- rarely has such a visionary and subversive collective graced this, or any other, city. When you get the chance to rub shoulders with intellectuals, freedom fighters and artists who are in it for something much more important than money, five pounds seems very cheap indeed.
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